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ISSN 2195-3171

Ash Wednesday 2015, 02/18/2015

AFTER THE ASHES
Sermon on Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21, by Paula L. Murray

“Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven. ²“So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. ³But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, ⁴so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

⁵“And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. ⁶But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

¹⁶“And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. ¹⁷But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, ¹⁸so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

¹⁹“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; ²⁰but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. ²¹For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (NRSV)

  I stand before you, a dirty, gray, ashen cross drawn across my forehead. You sit before me, dirty, gray, ashen crosses drawn across your foreheads. These smudged ashen crosses are signs of a piety deeply rooted in human nature; a visual scream of sorts, a denial of the grave awaiting each of us. It’s not just because we forget the ashes are there and get them on our clothes that we want to wipe them off our forehead; we don’t like what they signify. For millennia humankind has used ashes to signify death and mourning. For we are but dust, the Psalmist says (Psalm 113:14), “dust and ashes,” says Abraham (Genesis 18:27). Job gets word of the deaths of his children, the loss of his servants, flocks, and herds, loses his health, and sits in an ash heap covered in the sack cloth he has donned in place of his finery (Job 1-2). Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, we say, as we gather at the grave side and prepare to lower the casket into the earth which will hold the mortal remains of a man or woman, boy or child, who just days previously breathed air and walked the surface of the earth. It feels right that we should wear ashen crosses across our forehead, for, as the Apostle Paul tells in Romans 6, “the wages of sin is death.” We grieve not only death, our death, our loved ones’ deaths, the death of our neighbors, but the taint of sin that leads to death. Even Job, after long chapters protesting his faithfulness and denying his sin led to his losses, eventually comes to “despise” himself and “repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:6).

And so we sit here, ashen crosses drawn across balding foreheads or hiding under bangs, a sign not only of our impending mortality but of the sin that underlies it. If I were to guess, and admittedly, I’m not much of a mind reader, but if I were to guess what you are thinking now, it would be that the connection between sin and death is not all that clear. We are, in this age of cryogenic fantasies and dreams of vitamin regimes that will cure cancer, heart disease, and any other ill that might kill us including old age, as interested in denying the reality of our sin as we are in denying the truth of our deaths. Sure, there are the sick ax murderers of the world, the religious fanatics with Russian made Kalashnikovs and homemade bomb vests, the rapist, the child abuser, all those characters we see breathlessly described on the news. But we are not they; our sins don’t rise, or fall, to that level of wickedness. We’re garden variety sinners, not all that dangerous as sinners go.

I want you to do something for me, and I warn you in advance that what we do may not seem in line with the solemnity of the evening. However, you will see shortly why I ask this of you, and it will, I believe, make sense when all is said and done.

I want you to get as physically close to yourself as you can. Begin with a big hug, like this, now, bend over, as best you can, and acquaint yourself with your knees. Do you see anything down there? A bit of knee, foot, carpet, the back of seats, yes. Can you see the cross above the altar? No, you cannot. Can you see the ambo from which we hear the Word of God? No, you cannot. Can you see the font where you were washed clean of sin and God promised you forgiveness and life everlasting? No, you cannot. Can you tell what I am doing? No, you cannot. Can you see the expression on the face of your neighbor to the right or the left of you? No, you cannot. Now, you may sit up.

You were so curved in on yourself that you could not see anything other than yourself, and only limited portions of yourself at that. Martin Luther characterized sin as homo incurvatus in se, Latin for curved in on oneself. Like much of his inspiration outside of the Scriptures themselves, Luther probably got the phrase from St. Augustine, who got the idea itself while reflecting, scholars think, on Romans 7:15-19¹. The Apostle Paul complains, “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.”

Luther’s explanation of Paul’s dilemma, indeed, the dilemma we all face, is that as a consequence of sin human nature is “so deeply so deeply curved in on itself that it not only bends the best gifts of God towards itself and enjoys them (as is plain in the works-righteous and hypocrites), or rather even uses God himself in order to attain these gifts, but it also fails to realized that it so wickedly, curvedly, and viciously seeks all things, even God, for its own sake.” In plain English, we suffer from a spiritual narcissism so very extreme that we cannot see beyond ourselves and we use God’s gifts to us and even God himself for our own benefit.

The Gospel lessons seeming denunciation of piety, acts of religious devotion, is not aimed at the acts themselves, but at those who would use them to puff up their own sense of self rather than use them as God intends. Many a believer stands shivering on a cold night in February with an ashen cross on her forehead listening to the Gospel lesson and thinking to herself, “If it’s wrong to practice our piety before others why are we here?” It is not the cross on our foreheads that is at fault, nor our worship, this night, of God. The fault lies in the intent of the wearer of that ashen cross. If we are curved in on ourselves, that cross is worn to show everyone what a great Christian we are, to exalt, in other words, ourselves. If, with the Holy Spirit’s encouragement and support, we can unbend ourselves, sit our spirits up, and hear God’s voice in his Word or see him in the cross or receive him in bread and wine then that cross shaped smudge of ash on our faces glorifies our Father in heaven through his Son, our Redeemer Jesus Christ.

Years ago I took classes from Franklin Specht, a professor of history at a small college in the northwest. This small man dressed in tweeds and khakis whose untidy hair fell over his face was a genius at classroom management. He was quiet and amiable as the six foot plus football players lumbered into class and sprawled in their seats. Then he began to lecture, and he would walk over to one of the big men on campus and he would bend over and look him right in the eye, like three inches away and the student would start sliding back in his chair, back, back, and back some more and Dr. Specht would say n his most funereal voice, “Food for worms, that’s all you are, food for worms.”

Food for worms is all any of us are without the saving grace of God given us through Jesus Christ his Son. There is no vitamin strong enough, no tank cold enough to save us who are dust from returning to dust. Yet we are not insignificant in his eyes. He does not sweep us under the mat as we might sweep a dust bunny out of the way. Rather, he redeems our dust, makes the most of our ashes, by sanctifying our flesh through the Incarnation of the Son, and then taking it and our sin to the cross. That ashen smudge on your head is cross-shaped, more or less, to remind you that your dust has been redeemed through the cross on which our Lord died, and Christ has won the victory over death, a victory in which we share through our baptism into his death and resurrection.

We will walk through the sanctuary doors soon and head for home, and I assume that like me you will drive home hoping that you will remember to wipe the ashen cross from your forehead before you soil your pillows. Don’t laugh; I’ve heard more than one parishioner complain about the almost impossible to clean off smudge on a previously white pillow case. But if we wash it off our foreheads that cross shaped smudge of ash should remain indelibly drawn across our lives. The ashes are a permanent part of who we are as disciples of Jesus Christ. The daily exercise of faith is a life lived after the ashes. It is a life of daily repentance, daily submission to the person and ministry of Jesus, and daily care of our neighbor. We fast to let go of our hungers for our daily necessities, gifts of our good and gracious God. But we also fast to let go of our hungers for those things which draw us away from God and lead us to use the people around us as means to obtain things we should not want. We pray to come into the presence of God and to share that presence and his compassion and love with those in great need of him. But we also pray to remind ourselves that we are not the Creator but his creature. We give of God’s gifts to us that we might grow more daily in our trust of God’s continuing goodness. But we also give that we might be drawn more to love him who loved us so much he gave his life for us.

We are dust, but we are much loved dust. In his love, and in these practices associated with Lent, we have the assurance that we are treasured by him who is our treasure, our heavenly treasure that neither rusts nor dies.